In Disagreement with Christopher Hitchens

I am currently reading, “god is not Great: How religion Poisons Everything” By Christopher Hitchens. So far the book is very interesting and although his tone seems very angry at times, his skills as a writer are undeniable. I also agree with many of his opinions but I came across a section in which he’s not 100% accurate and although it is just a small technicality, it made me think about what else he could have slipped on in-order to exaggerate or prove his point. It is little slips like this one which, although minuscule, make the author lose a little bit of credibility. I still enjoy the book, and will continue reading it. But I just had to bring this to the attention of the readers.

This is the quote: the subject is the Mayans.

“It is a certainty that these people, too, had their creation myths and their revelations of the divine will, for all the good it did them. But they suffered and triumphed and expired without ever being in “our” prayers. And they died out in the bitter awareness that there would be nobody to remember them as they had been, or even as if they had been.”

Now, although this is probably true for the Incas, Olmecs, Aztecs and many other smaller tribes, It is not true for the Mayans. In fact the Mayans still live today. I had the opportunity to travel to the Yucatan and have met many of the ancestors of the original Mayan civilisation. They never died out and are more numerous in south Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize. The Mayan empire collapsed in the early 900’s (A.D.), The Spanish didn’t show up until the 1500’s, long after their collapse. The survivors of this grand and ancient civilization still live in the surrounding areas of their pyramids and temples. They are now poor farmers, living in huts, as the ancient ones lived (Mayans did not live in their temples). Some of them still speak Mayan or one of the dialects of the language. There are even some tribes of Mayans that may still practice their original beliefs and that live in remote areas of Guatemala’s and Honduras’s jungles. On a tour through the jungle in Honduras (we were trying to find a fertility stone, which is a statue of a frog with a platform. The place where pregnant Mayan women had to travel to and give birth),my family and I had a strange encounter with a beautiful, young, Mayan girl who was bathing under a small stream of falling water. I felt as if I had traveled through time. In any case, Christopher Hitchens was incorrect when he stated that this civilization was wiped out by the Spanish. Many of them did die when the Spanish arrived in the 1500’s , and many were also converted to Christianity, but not all and they’re culture is still very much alive. and to state that, even if it helps to make your point of making these Spanish inquisitors seem like savages, which they really don’t need much more help to make, is just a little bit irresponsible in his part.

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Tags: "god is not great: how religion poisons everythig", ancient civilizations, christianity, Christopher Hitchens, cultures, history, mayans, religion, yucatan

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